Invest Yourself

Before we start our conversation today, I want to pass along a little tip that many of you might not know exists. Do you do any shopping at Walmart? We do. While we visit our local farm market for our meats and veggies, we do the Walmart thing for paper products, canned goods, etc. Well, they have a pretty neat thing called a savings catcher. It won’t make you rich, but it’s an interesting idea.

If you go to savingscatcher.walmart.com you can sign up for their free service. What the jist of it is; is this…. Any time you go to WMT and buy something, you take your receipt and at the bottom of it is a TC# right above the bar code. You enter that into the savings catcher and the date of the receipt. WMT then compares the items you bought to other stores in the area and if anything you bought could be found for less somewhere else, they give you the difference. You can load it on a gift card, etc. It’s a neat function. While on say grocery items you might only get back a buck, or two…if you buy say electronics, sporting goods, etc, it can add up. Our gift card is up to 29 dollars, and that’s ONLY on canned goods and paper products since October. When it gets to 50, I’m going to buy some Ammo. Check it out.

I like to study history, because quite often what we are told happened, is quite different from what really did happen. While it is attributed to just about every world leader of recent times, the adage “history is written by the winners” goes back millennium, in various twists. I’ve seen it as “History is written by those who have hanged hero’s” and I’ve seen other variants such as "History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon."

While researching various incidents that occurred during WWII I was given a book called “Is Paris Burning?” The thrust of the book was that when Hitler realized that France was going to be liberated, he instructed the Generals in charge of the French occupation to burn Paris to the ground as his troops evacuated the area. But the main man in charge of that operation had reservations about doing it. It didn’t seem like a humane thing to do, and he continued to put it off. Ultimately he refused to give the order, despite an almost hysterical Hitler demanding it.

Yesterday turned into quite a mess during the afternoon. The market was doing what we thought it would do, which is add to the gains we had Monday. But then things went to hell in a handbag when news hit that over in Hamburg, a soccer match was canceled because of "concrete" terror bombing threats. Then all manner of rumors and "quotes" started flying around. The first was that an ambulance packed with explosives had been found. Then they said there was no explosives. People were freaking out that the Paris thing was still in play with different cells in different nations acting out their parts.